DosViolines
far from home...
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2005
- Messages
- 3,217
- Reaction score
- 12
source: nytimes.com
I wasn't sure where to post this, but since dance is an art form...
I wasn't sure where to post this, but since dance is an art form...
Run With Scissors? And Then Some
By KRISTIN HOHENADEL
Published: November 22, 2005
LONDON - Over the last decade, the choreographer Matthew Bourne has carved a popular niche between dance and theater, starting with his 1995 version of "Swan Lake," in which the women in tutus were replaced by hunks in feathers, and continuing with restagings of ballet classics like "Cinderella" and "Nutcracker."
Sadler's Wells Sam Archer in the title role of Matthew Bourne's dance work "Edward Scissorhands," inspired by the 1990 movie.
Hugo Glendinning Matthew Bourne, left, at a rehearsal for his new work, "Edward Scissorhands," which begins performances in London tomorrow.
Mr. Bourne, 45, has always been better known for his directing skills and highly collaborative working process than for his choreographic imagination. He uses movies as muses and reference points and urges his performers to create their roles like actors, a process that results in productions that read more like silent films than works of dance.
So it may seem inevitable that Mr. Bourne's latest project, for his New Adventures company, is an adaptation of a Hollywood film - Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands," the gothic fairy tale about a boy with scissors for hands who tries to find love and acceptance in suburbia.
"It's a piece of theater that's been inspired by a movie that we all love," Mr. Bourne said recently during a rehearsal break at Shoreditch Town Hall, not far from Sadler's Wells theater, where the show begins on Nov. 23. "But it has to surprise people who know the film really well."
Still, Mr. Bourne said he didn't think of the film as fodder for a show until composer friends asked him to brainstorm about movies that could be turned into musicals. The project never materialized, and Mr. Bourne decided to stage it himself as a dance piece, using Danny Elfman's original film score as a point of departure. (Terry Davies, who wrote music for Mr. Bourne's "Car Man" and "Play Without Words," adapted it.)
It took several years to persuade the studio and the filmmakers to sell them the rights, Mr. Bourne said. After Mr. Burton had seen a few of his shows, Mr. Bourne recalled, he said: " 'It's not what I do - I don't know how to do that - but I get it. Take it and do your thing with it.' " The production, which features 30 dancers and cost $2.2 million including rights, runs at Sadler's Wells through Feb. 5 and will tour Britain for 14 weeks before heading to Japan and Korea through August. Mr. Bourne said several New York producers were coming to London to appraise it for an American tour in 2007.
Mr. Bourne stressed that his "Edward Scissorhands" was not a copy of the movie, but a reinvention of the story. "It's not something we've studied as a group or talked about much," he said of the film. Nevertheless, he said he sent his dancers home with "a suitcase full of DVD's" to help them develop their characters - "American types," he said, also gleaned from sitcoms like "Roseanne," "All in the Family" and "The Brady Bunch."
A longtime collaborator, Lez Brotherston, designed the plastic scissorhands, which the dancers had been maneuvering with increasing skill until, halfway into rehearsals, Edward's fingers began to snap off at the ends. But scissors were nowhere in sight as Mr. Bourne rehearsed a fantasy sequence in which Edward whisks the object of his affection into a swirlingly romantic pas de deux, surrounded by a landscape of dancing topiaries. Mr. Bourne had struggled to translate a memorable scene in the film in which Edward sculptures a lawn of topiaries to dazzling effect. "I thought, 'Our coup is a stage full of topiary people who dance.' What we've tried to find, I suppose, is theatrical magic - theatricality rather than filmic wizardry."
His human topiaries - who would later be draped in hedge - stood at ease wearing sweats and T-shirts. Mr. Bourne sat behind an iBook, consulted sheets of handwritten line counts, then stepped into the center of the room, tipped his head to the arched sky-high ceiling and began to think aloud. He took a few steps forward, a few steps back. He posed in front of a trio of female dancers, put the back of his hand to his forehead, maiden-in-distress style. Then he smiled bashfully and gave the group a soft-spoken command to give that a whirl.
"They all think I know what I'm going to do next," he said later. "I haven't got a clue! I always hope the next thing will spring out of what I've just seen. I know the music very well and I know the kind of thing I want to happen in each section. But when I've worked out things on paper for hours and hours and it comes time to do them in a studio, they never look like the little dots you've done on the page."
Mr. Bourne writes scenarios for his productions that read like movie treatments and function as a blueprint for the cast and crew. He collaborated on the synopsis for "Edward Scissorhands" with Caroline Thompson, who wrote the original screenplay nearly 20 years ago.
Mr. Bourne said, "Caroline always imagined him like a stray dog - when it's taken in and it loves you."
"He's the ultimate outsider, isn't he, really?" Mr. Bourne continued, adding that Edward's difference is a universal metaphor for anyone who has ever experienced prejudice or bigotry.
Ms. Thompson said by phone from California, "I think there's something in Matthew that really connects to the loneliness of Edward." Telling the same story in a different medium means sacrificing favorite scenes that lack drama onstage and creating opportunities for movement - a brief barbecue in the film turns into an elaborate pool party onstage, with music and dancing. Mr. Bourne - who is always keen to embellish the psychological backstory - has added a prologue that explains that Edward Scissorhands is the product of a hapless, grief-stricken inventor desperate to recreate his lost son, using household furnishings.
Ms. Thompson said that in reinventing material to work within the practical considerations of theater, "I actually came up with a better ending than I did for the movie."
Still, the ending of this doomed love story remains bittersweet.
"You could tell another story - they could run off together and live in a more liberal place," Mr. Bourne said. "But I think because he is essentially made out of pieces lying around a room, he's symbolic rather than real in many ways."
Besides, he added, "If they were to come together, it would be a little freaky, the whole thing with those blades."
the dancing topiary costumes!
